Sapphire 11179-09-20G HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 Graphics Card

I have been using the Sapphire Radeon 6870 for like 2 weeks now and I have to say It's amazing. For the price you pay, you wont be disappointed. Since having this graphics card I have been playing games all maxxed out, games like Battlefield 3, Warhammer 40k: Space Marine and Skyrim, this card handles the games with no problems whatsoever. The amount of FPS it dishes out is very impressive.

Highly recommended !

The 6870 is enjoying a bit of a renaissance; since it's been updated by the 69xx series cards, the 68xx nonetheless remains a very competitive card but most importantly, the price has dropped substantially. The "Barts" GPU core was intended to update the older 58xx series with a die-shrink, improved antialiasing, crossfire performance, and cooling. The 6870 is actually a replacement for the 5770, rather than the 5870, and fits in between the 5850 and 5870 in performance terms.

As a standalone card, these are pretty fast; around Geforce 460 levels, but the real secret is Crossfire performance. I picked up two of these, and reviews have found that running two 6870s in CrossfireX mode delivers scaling on the order of 85-99% - i.e. very close to literally twice as fast. Two of these cards in concert are £100 cheaper than a single Geforce 580, but importantly, faster. I've been trying out these cards in various recent games such as the Hard Reset demo, and found that when AMD released the updated Crossfire profile for the title, average framerates went from 55fps with a single card to 120fps with two cards (using an i5 2500K at 4.3Ghz). Also remember these are DX11 capable cards, with tesselation and morphological AA support. Despite running two cards instead of one, these cards are quiet and run around 70C at full load under e.g. Furmark. I initially had a bit trouble using the HDMI-out on these cards, entailing some swapping around etc. and was never able to resolve it, but the DVI ports work fine and all is well now.

These are decent cards individually, but the sweet spot right is two of them. It's worth experimenting.

NB : for some reason, Sapphire didn't provide a Crossfire bridge connector with either card, which was a bit of a bummer. I was able to find one at a local PC repair/building place, however.

good card so far, first AMD/ATI card i've ever had, and it looks great, and i cant hear it over my ambient PC noise!
currently it runs Skyrim on ultra detail, at 1600x900 (my monitors max) with FSAA OFF, at 45-55 FPS.
my system is:
Q6600 OC'd @ 3.0GHZ
4gb ddr2 800mhz ram
620w PSU
Gigabyte p35 Mobo.
win7 64bit

my old card was a good old Nvidia 9800GTX+, which could also run Skyrim on the same settings, but at a slightly lower FPS, around 35-45, but 25 or lower in doors? (not sure why)
it was a great card, but died so i looked for this as an upgrade.
great replacement, smaller, cooler, and faster.
i can also max out Crysis, FarCry 2, and a few other older games, and run at 60fps+

didnt come with Dirt game, like some other do, but then i dont want it, so no loss there... (had my fingers crossed i'd randomly get BF3, but no luck)

only reason for 4 stars is the driver installation was abit of a fiddle, not sure why, but windows would not let me install the AMD drivers and kept installing its own, which sucked.. lol sorted it in the end after several uninstalls and restarts.
Nivida cards i;ve had didnt have any problems like that so i took a star off.
actually worked 100% fine on my windows 8 preview install!